To Grow Weary of the Sun
by Naladot
Summary: Safe Haven was never the mythic paradise it was said to be. Pieces of Adelle's bittersweet life between Epitaph 1 and 2. Adelle; ensemble; Dewitt/Dominic.


Disclaimer: Naturally, I do not own Dollhouse.

**To Grow Weary of the Sun**

Safe Haven never felt so much a place as it did a state of existence, a canyon of in-between, an incessant act of _waiting_. Adelle woke up in the morning without the sense that this was Arizona or Tucson or even Hell itself. It was Safe Haven: a place where they waited, petulantly, for the gradual winding down and guttering out of mankind. Sometimes, late at night, a few of them would sit around a table to discuss _what ifs_ and _maybes_, pipe dreams that floated into the air and clung to their shabby clothing.

Every morning Adelle would stir her contrition into a cup of instant tea and drink it down, a bitter burning liquid, then harden herself against the state of being in Safe Haven, when all along it rubbed her bloody and raw.

* * *

Priya announced her pregnancy in a guilty whisper, and only to Adelle and Dominic—Adelle, the woman-who-would-take-care-of-it, and Dominic, Priya's friend made from their common disdain for everyone else on the compound. The three of them locked themselves into the never-used bathroom of the Main House. Adelle sat on the cold side of the tub and watched the shadows dig themselves into Priya's eyes and wrap around her barely-swollen stomach. Dominic sat on the toilet seat and stared out the grime stained window.

"I didn't mean to," Priya said, looking at herself in the mirror. "Stupid. Stupid."

"It's done," Adelle told her. "No use condemning yourself."

Priya turned, leaning herself against the counter and running her hands through her hair, her eyes hungry, begging for options in the place that offered only one. "Maybe I want it un-done."

In the end, though, her stomach grew round and she spent most of her time behind the locked door of her bedroom lest anyone coo over the promise of New Life and Hope and Ten Fingers And Toes.

And she loved her son more than Adelle knew it was possible to love: she could feel it in her bones when Priya so much as said his name, and even though T reminded them both of things-they-could-live-without, he was the sole joy of the compound, and they orbited around him, hoping that he would never see through the chinks in their charade and realize that he was only the tip of a mountain rising above the floodwaters, and eventually he too would be submerged.

* * *

Working in the garden reminded Adelle of snatches of ancient religions and myths she couldn't quite recall, now, but they remained in the garden like ghosts. Things like _cyclical movement of time_ or _time is an illusion_ or _eschaton_, said in the Cornish accent of a professor she'd not paid enough attention to, seduced as she was by the call of Almighty Science. In those days she'd sat in lectures and gone on a few dates with that lovely Frenchman who quoted the Modernist writers as though they were deities, and the world had seemed so large and full. Memories of Then lurked in the garden as with diligent hands she nursed the plants to death. They flitted around her like dreams, and sometimes she believed that she made them up so that she could think there had once been a place that was not Safe Haven, and that once, her heart had not been hard.

* * *

She'd taken a bullet through the arm and large gashes across her back just before reaching the compound, so when they did she was First Priority, where's-the-doctor-dammit status. Laurence Dominic held her hand while they stitched her up and in the delirium of pain she'd thought it was so _funny_, because if he were thinking straight he'd be telling them to leave her be and let the blood seep out of her back and arm and onto the ground, and then he could put _her_ in a box. Forever. His grip around her fingers almost hurt worse than the wounds, and this was another kind of mercy.

Later, he'd brought Topher into her room, pushing him forward with his hands on Topher's shoulders and closing the door behind them. She'd known because Topher wasn't looking at her that he was scared out of his mind, so she lifted her healthy arm to him and had him kneel next to her cot, running her fingers through her hair and whispering, "I'm alive, sweetheart, don't cry" in his ear. He had always been like a child, only now he was a frightened child with the horror of his adulthood knotted up inside his chest. Someone came to get him, and Laurence silenced her protests with a look. She never would have stood for that look, before.

When he sat down next to her his eyes glistened too brightly. They ended up talking about their families, already lost in the state of non-existence that would define their lives in Safe Haven. They talked for an hour as though their families weren't dead (or worse), but something more like china dolls in a glass cabinet, ready to be opened and pulled out at any time, in danger only of dust and fading. His niece would be four in April, and she wondered why he'd never mentioned her, except for that fact that he'd hurt Adelle _first_, and he'd been so utterly _right_ about everything. She hated him, a little bit, but pressed her palm to his cheek anyway that she might savor the feeling of someone alive and himself next to her, and with the words of touch, speak the things she could never say (_I'm sorry, forgive me_).

* * *

Some people got scurvy, the first year. Adelle waited for someone to make a joke about pirates and for a long time no one did, until Alpha said something about it as he handed Juicy-Juice boxes around a table and waited patiently for his dues as resident comedian. Despite herself, Adelle coughed up a real honest-to-God laugh that rang stale in the silence. She rolled her eyes at their lack of a sense of humor and felt a pang in her chest, because Topher would have been cracking jokes this whole time and she would have been pretending they weren't funny, and that's the way things were supposed to be.

Back then there were still people enough to have war, and Tucson attracted bombs like lighting rods did lightning, being the new "Neuropolis" and all. An idiotic name. She covered her mouth with a handkerchief and stepped outside just to feel air untainted by despair—outside the air was polluted with only survival-of-the-fittest, and the ash seemed to suggest that most everything was not fit to survive. She watched the people on guard duty patrol the outside of the compound, their rifles like army flags, their dark forms pasted against the dark sky. The red sun above them, a bloody eye. Adelle could not say if it looked down on them with pity or revulsion.

* * *

For awhile it seemed as though Caroline was waiting for her to die, and that she would gladly speed the process along if it weren't for the misguided trust so many put in Adelle. They circled each other, seldom speaking directly, Caroline leaving for long periods of time with Paul at her heels and Adelle holding her ground in silence whenever Caroline did return. Caroline was always insisting that she was _Echo_, that Caroline was only one component of a whole.

"Don't be silly, darling," Adelle said, handing her a bowl of thin soup. "You can call yourself whatever you want, but you are no god; you are nothing more than _Caroline_, and that is what I will call you."

They lasted this way for four years, existing in separate Safe Havens, until one day they didn't quite anymore. The change was incremental, a shift in Adelle and not Caroline, a something she couldn't define that left her feeling far too maternal towards the woman who would rather she were dead.

And it was Caroline who sat up all night with Adelle when Dominic disappeared, pretending as though it were Dominic she was worried about, but the truth came through when the sun was rising and Adelle was scrubbing a pot for the fifth time.

"Stop," she said, taking the pot from Adelle's hand. Adelle rather expected a lecture on their water rations, but it never came. "You're going to worry yourself to death, and we _need_ you, Dewitt." She sat her at the kitchen table, the expression on her face somewhere between earnest and heartbroken. "He's alive, but even if he's not, you're strong enough to be okay."

* * *

Sometimes they'd have music night, crying up at the moon like coyotes, dancing until dawn was a thin line over the mountains. It was so primal, meant to be painted on the sides of caves and engraved in pieces of pottery buried for the sole purpose of one day being found by an archaeologist. Recorded in brush strokes and mosaic.

Except: Beyonce and U2 never seemed to fit, quite, with the rest of this image.

This is how the built their life, though, somewhere between the very old and recently lost, the mythic and the Hard Facts, the movement and the standstill. Like constantly catching your breath, or waking to find you can't move.

Sometimes Adelle thought of what they'd leave for their children, and how little of it their children would want. Possibly their children wouldn't even want the same resurrection of civilization that their parents spoke about in hopeless hisses, instead letting everything die away peacefully, without a struggle. It was almost romantic, and Adelle despised the thought.

* * *

After Anthony was officially gone he'd return every few months, not To Stay but To Check In, as though when he were gone they all subconsciously counted the days between his departure and return. Which they did, or at least Priya did, and loathed him because of it. He always came alone, but too often he'd leave in the night with another former Active, drawn away by the open road and Time that moved forward instead of wallowing in a puddle.

Even so, one day he turned up with six chickens, and Adelle forgave him, for a little while, for everything. He helped her build a coop under the approving gaze of Dominic's pet cat, who thought she belonged, really, to Adelle. Dominic had different names for her: "Mrs. Butterworth" (in general), "My Little One" (when he thought no one was listening) and "Dammit-cat-MOVE!" (when he tripped over her in the middle of the night). Adelle called her Your Majesty, because it seemed more fitting. Cats needed to have names appropriate to their innate dignity, especially one as assured of her regality as this one.

Anthony's knuckles were covered in fresh tattoos and his eyes glinted with the remembrance bought from metallic knowledge, and this was among the things Adelle would never tell Priya, piled up with the knowledge that once she'd made Anthony into a caricature of a real man and told herself it was what she needed, throwing _his_ needs in the dirt. Adelle wondered what lies she still told herself at night that she might fall asleep, because Safe Haven was not honest or true. It was a lie, claiming survival, claiming possibilities, claiming hope, and if you looked at it long enough, you'd see how false this was.

That was why Anthony left. That was why Dominic left. That was why Alpha left. That was why they'd all leave, eventually. But until that day they wrapped themselves up in the warm blankets of untruth and pretended to feel secure while the world fell apart around them.

* * *

She loved two men truly in her life: Topher and Laurence. Topher could not love her back and Laurence could not bear something so raw and demanding as true love in the middle of this Hell (Safe Haven), and she'd couldn't either, so it was all For The Best.

But when he left, finally, finality, he took a bit of her with him and she hid the hole from all the rest, but to herself she could not cover it up with lies.

The day before he left stood out to her as the quietest day in Safe Haven, and later she'd realize that it was the only day Time seemed to draw itself up like some wounded animal and limp forward. Nothing hurt worse than that day, not even the day Topher was taken, not even the day poor little Susanna was raped, not even the day she watched Thomas die. Dominic helped her prepare dinner; most everyone was gone but she and Dominic and Priya sat around the kitchen table, Topher and T battling with tiny plastic dinosaurs and jedi in the corner. The eggs were fresh and somehow Dominic had procured three beers and even gotten them cold, and the days of vodka and designer heels were so far from her mind that they seemed utterly unreal. They'd laughed, too, and for a moment things had settled around them, belying reality, and this might have been why Dominic left, too: because of all things, they could not believe in Safe Haven.

In the semi-dark she'd trailed the pads of her fingertips along his birthmark, _I am Laurence Dominic_, knowing that while he pretended to be asleep he was really awake. "I love you," she said, because she would not say it while he was awake or sleeping but only now, and the words burned her lips. She was not used to real things, not here.

Defying all her expectations and the rules of how Safe Haven worked, he'd abandoned pretense and turned over, his eyes boring into hers. "I love you, too," he said, and she thought she would burst from the pressure inside her chest when he kissed her.

She wasn't surprised that he left.

But it hurt like Hell all the same.

* * *

When they'd arrived Safe Haven had been nothing but the gutted carcasses of suburban homes and a flat metal idol rising on the rooftop, promising to let them keep their minds so long as it received its dues. Oh, the things Adelle saw sacrificed to that idol: their freedom (they could not go outside of its boundaries, and they shuddered to imagine life without it), their fellow men ("We can get Topher back. We can't get the tech back if they take it."), their love (it should have set them free, because there they had their own minds, but that was it, wasn't it? Too many relationships were torn apart by its solar-powered hum). They sat inside Safe Haven's walls and watched as the rest of the world drowned. It seemed Safe Haven would go on forever.

* * *

During the monsoon season they are mostly confined to the house, sitting around in small clusters, talking in rain-rhythmic murmurs. The specifics are different but it's always the same, the stifling smell of rain pervading the house and the chill of a breeze when they open a window. They mostly talk about nothing: plans for the Hill House or plots of TV shows long off the air. But sometimes Adelle reads to them from the water-damaged pages of novels someone had gone to far too much trouble to procure for her, and silence descends over the house in a way that is enlightening and troubling all at once. She reads the words of men and women long in their graves and something slices through them, something that leaves Adelle hiding her trembling hands from the others.

She watches the rain fall and thinks of arks and sacrifices and precious things like _love_ and _identity_ and _faith_. Maybe she sits in front of Topher with a bowl of instant oatmeal and pleads with him to eat, or maybe Alpha is teaching her how to sew on their new sewing machine, or maybe they all sit at the dinner table and under it Laurence holds her hand in his lap. The rains pour down and they are buoyed by nothing more than chance, and if she thinks she can see the sun scissoring through the clouds, well.

Safe Haven is nothing more than pipe dreams and contrition in their cups of tea.

_End._


End file.
